Residents across Mineral and Hampshire counties spoke about the need for more substance use prevention and recovery resources, higher-paying jobs and affordable housing options. They said they’d also like to see increased access to basic services, including broadband and additional health care services.
As part of Mountain State Spotlight’s “Citizens Agenda” approach to covering this year’s elections, we asked candidates running to represent the 88th House district, which encompasses parts of the two counties, about these issues.
Republican incumbent Rick Hillenbrand, a retired naval engineer, is running to represent the district for a second term. His Democratic opponent is Amanda Vincent, a small business owner and farmer in Hampshire County.
These interviews have been edited for clarity and length.
Some residents spoke about substance use disorder and the need for more recovery and preventative programs, saying that there aren’t enough resources to currently meet the needs. If elected, how would you help meet the prevention and recovery needs of the district?
Hillenbrand: I think there are a number of tools out there. Significantly they’re not being used to the fullest extent. I would also say that there isn’t a single solution that works for everybody. Hampshire County, for instance, has a very successful drug court program. Recently we had a graduation. There are only three graduates, and that’s a little bit by design, but it also indicates either a lack of willingness to participate or ability to complete the program.
If you’re not familiar with the drug court program, it’s pretty rigorous with regards to making sure that you’re not going to continue down the path that got you to that point. Remember that the drug court is basically a diversion program that is in lieu of being sent off to do time in jail or something along those lines. And if you fall off track and don’t continue down that path, you don’t get to graduate. But it’s a good program. I know a number of folks that have completed it, know the families and the individuals personally, and they will tell you, “Hey, that really helped turn my life around.”
So, helping to expand programs like the drug court, which are successful, I think, is important. (The Senate passed a bill) to permit the development of an Opioid Treatment Program as long as it is a part of a clinical trial and approved by an institutional review board. The idea there is to not wholeheartedly just support stuff wishing that is going to be helpful. But find those things that are really going to work, and then go pursue those.
I think that the bigger issue is prevention in the first place. When they’re young we don’t typically see these problems. When they get older, that’s when they get off track.
In the state, we have a neat program called Game Changer. Game Changer is working hard to educate the kids when they’re at that very impressionable age, which tends to happen older middle school and into high school, they sometimes make decisions that aren’t the best. I think part of the issue is we need more programs to help keep the kids engaged with “healthy,” good types of after-school programs. So whether it’s encouraging them to join FFA or 4H or Scouts or whatever, sports, those types of things. Then, I think that they don’t have as much idle time and end up leaning toward bad decisions.
Again, no single solution is going to solve it for everybody. You need a whole mortgage board of ideas there. So I support that idea, and I want to talk about our commissioners and the school superintendents with regards to, how do we encourage this? Keep the kids doing good things. Don’t allow them that idle time where bad things happen.
Vincent: I decided to run last year and literally the first place I went after I decided to run was our local recovery center. There’s one here in Romney. I’m lucky enough to where my family’s never dealt with drugs. I’ve never had to deal with drugs. Therefore I’m like, “I need to know what people need because I’ve never personally experienced that.” So, I went there and I spoke with them. They themselves didn’t have too many answers for me, and I’ve talked to people in the district as well, and drugs come up a lot.
I have friends whose children have died from overdoses and things like that. What concerns me is some of the elected officials around here have stated things like, “We have really great programs going on. Everything’s going great.” But people are still really concerned about it. So, if the people you’re serving think that there should be more recovery centers, we should probably be looking into more recovery centers. I think that the people who are involved in harm reduction, in recovery centers if that’s what they are saying — they’re the experts, they’re the ones involved with this — if that’s what they’re saying, I think that we should look into this more.
Additionally, residents also said primary care doctors and mental health counselors have months-long waiting lists, which often require residents to seek health care elsewhere. What would you do to increase access to health care?
Hillenbrand: To tell you the truth, it’s not an area that I’m extremely expert on, so I rely upon those that know more about it.
I don’t have a whole lot of great answers for access to health care. I think we’re doing better where we are in District 88, which is parts of Mineral and Hampshire County. If you look at the hospital over in Keyser, for instance, they’re now getting recognition as being a very good stroke center.
The waiting list, I can’t figure that out myself. I’ll use a personal example. My wife needs an endoscopy. It took more than three months to see the doctor to validate that “Yes, she needs an endoscopy,” and now we’re waiting on scheduling, which will be another three months to actually get the endoscopy. And I feel like we’ve got kind of the gold standard when it comes to healthcare and all the rest of that, and we’re still talking six months. And let’s face it, at this point in our lives — and sadly, my first wife died from gastroesophageal cancer — six months is a long time. My first wife went from no problems, within two years, she was stage four.
When I say we’ve got a pretty good health program ourselves, as a retired military and being over 65 we’ve got both Medicare, and I’ve got military health care for myself and my wife.
The issues start to become that we don’t have enough healthcare providers. So part of the solution is allowing other healthcare practitioners that are not full MDs or DOs to do more within their scope and abilities. So nurse practitioners and those sorts of things. There are some limitations. If you go see a doctor, and you’re going to need a prescription for a narcotic or something like that, the doctor is going to be able to give you a prescription with a larger number of doses, whereas a nurse practitioner may be only able to give you the three-day prescription.
We (the Legislature) have been passing bills, and we continue to do that with regard to trying to extend our healthcare community. We did pass a bill that basically provides more money, in this current special session, for nurses, nursing programs in particular. But I don’t have the ability, I guess, to convince a whole bunch of people to go be a doctor. When I think about my own son as an example – it’s a very costly thing. I think that’s no surprise.
So again, we need to encourage people as much as we can. And we do have programs in the state, we’re trying to grow our own. Encouraging people, “Hey, we’ll give you a break if you go to WVU. They’ve got a good med program. They’re a level one trauma center. Would you just please stay in West Virginia? Don’t go somewhere else.”
Vincent: That is an issue for me as well. I actually have to drive an hour out of state to go see my primary care. I’m a veteran. I go to Winchester, which is an hour’s drive from my house. My nearest VA is two hours away, so if I have to do anything like X-rays and stuff like that, I have to drive two hours.
I’m going to go back to the sentiment that I’ve seen from current elected officials of being like everything’s fine. For example, it was a county commission meeting here in Hampshire County, one of my friends spoke up about the fact that there was no OB-GYN in the county at all. And one of the county commissioners was like, “Well, there’s one in Baker, West Virginia.” Baker, West Virginia, is outside of the county. It’s 45 minutes from where I live. It was that sentiment of, “Well, if you need it, just like, go out of the state, go out of the county. It’s there. It’s just not here.” I think the first thing is being like, “Yes, I hear you and that’s what we need to look into.”
The second thing is, I feel like it’s very hard to attract medical professionals in this area to begin with because a lot of people don’t want to move into this area. There’s not very much for people, and that kind of goes back to much, bigger overlying issues.
But I feel like our legislators have been focusing on businesses for so long, not necessarily medical businesses. Actually, I feel like they’ve been kind of pushing out medical businesses through their legislation of trying to control people and their medical decisions. But I think that they’ve been focused on big business for so long, I think that they’ve lost sight of families. I feel like, if you bring families in, you’re going to have to bring more doctors in. Then, people are going to want to be here.
Several parts of the counties are still struggling with access to reliable internet. What would you do to improve access to the Internet?
Hillenbrand: This is one of my pet peeves and one of my areas that I focus on a lot. Amongst other things, I’ve got a technology background, specifically with computer technology-type stuff, and I’m also on the technology committee.
We’ve got a whole bunch of money that’s been thrown at the state through various programs over the last few years. Most recently, this (Broadband Equity Access and Deployment) BEAD money, $1.2 billion, which they’re working on getting those contracts out there and awarded.
I introduced the bill last year and already sent it down to bill drafting to reintroduce it. The bill specifically is designed that if your telecommunication service has been disrupted for 120 hours, which is five days, and we switch it to 120 hours to be specific, within a billing period, then the telecommunications provider is responsible to provide you, without your asking for it, credit proportional to the lack of service. So if you’re out for 10 days, you get 10 days worth of service credit. We also include the ability for businesses to go to the telecommunications provider for lost business.
Kelly Workman, who’s our broadband director, she’s very optimistic that we will have fiber optic to every serviceable address in this state by the end of 2029. I hope she’s right. I really do. We need this.
Now again, what are we doing? We passed some legislation in this special session that was earmarking some money for helping with guaranteed loans for companies that want to apply for the BEAD program because there’s a loan matching commitment component and things like that. And if you don’t have a lot of cash upfront on your own, it makes it difficult for the smaller (Internet Service Providers) ISPs to participate.
Vincent: What I’m hearing from county commissioners is that there is work being done to improve internet access. I know there’s a big issue about the terrain here. There’s not a lot of fiber optic capability because they’re going through literal mountains. But I heard that the work is being done. I think that maybe more work needs to be done to advertise that because that does come up a lot. But it is an issue.
Residents also brought up the need for affordable housing. As more people work outside the state for higher wages and some parts of the district see population growth, the cost of housing has increased, often pricing out local community members. And the limited supply of existing housing has only further exacerbated this. What will you do to help increase the number of safe and affordable housing options in the district?
Hillenbrand: I think this is a chicken and egg routine. Part of the problem that we have with regards to getting more jobs in the areas and employers to relocate here is trying to find affordable housing. In our country where we’re driven by a capitalistic, free-market model, we can’t force people to go build houses. I don’t think the answer is to build more public housing.
The demand, as you noted, is much higher than the supply, and then the raw cost of materials. Don’t have a good answer for bringing that down. Although I know at the federal level, they’re talking about various incentives for first-time homebuyers and things like that, I’m not sure if that’s going to help first-time homebuyers or drive up costs to tell you the truth.
If you look at it, though, our housing is really not that unaffordable. I mean the cost of housing in West Virginia in particular, and there are exceptions to this, but for the most part, it’s pretty affordable compared to other places. I do know there are people out there that find it frustrating trying to find a place to buy or stuff like that. They find that there’s a lot of demand on the market.
I am going to be going to a realtors professional luncheon, or whatever. We’re going to talk a little bit about that next month, and maybe they’ve got some ideas that we haven’t thought of.
Vincent: Are you familiar with the Pilgrims plants in Moorefield? I did work there for a period of time, and I knew several people who had a really hard time trying to find housing. So, Pilgrims has actually bought up a lot of housing in this area, typically Keyser, and that’s Mineral County. So, that’s one issue I hear from people, like “Well, Pilgrims is buying up a lot of these properties and there’s literally nowhere else for me to go.”
The second thing is that there’s a lot of housing that are Airbnbs or they’re weekend cabins. That is a really big issue. In my head, I’m thinking, “Should we try and think more about legislation capping how much a company can purchase, for example.” But then, you go into trying to control business. So it’s really difficult around here, and that, unfortunately, is one that I’m struggling with, figuring out affordable housing in this area.
Residents also spoke about how many folks travel outside the district and into neighboring states to find well-paying jobs. Teachers were often brought up as an example because they could work in Virginia or Maryland and get at least 10 to 20 thousand dollars a year more than they could get here. How would you bring jobs with competitive wages into the district?
Hillenbrand: I’ve tried to work closely with the economic development folks. The counties kind of run their own show and I have two counties, and they’re very different in their approaches.
Mineral County, for 150 years, has been much more industrialized than Hampshire County, going back to even when Mineral County was a part of Hampshire County.
Hampshire County today is very agrarian. Talking with some of our county commissioners and other officials, for the most part, there seems to be two camps with regards to moving forward with regard to remaining a significantly agricultural county in Hampshire County or not. There are some companies that are working to relocate into Hampshire County. Aqua Bank is one that I’ve been working with specifically, trying to encourage them. And they’re on the path that potentially could bring a lot of good-paying jobs.
In Mineral County, they’re doing well with regards to attracting new businesses. If you look at their economic development, they’ve increased tenfold in the last eight years, with regards to how much business has been brought into Mineral County.
Let’s go back to the teacher component. The teachers complain about pay and all the rest of that. It’s a common thing. But there’s another component. The other component is we could pay more, but are the people willing to pay more? So your pay has two significant components. The State gives a certain amount, but the counties give an amount too. The county has complained in the past about not being able to attract and retain teachers like a lot have. Well, sometimes they get a better offer by other counties. So maybe a good candidate in Hampshire Counties is lost to let’s say Mineral County because the county contributes to the school bill as well.
We could pay more. The question becomes, are the taxpayers willing to do that? And we’ve got a lot of other issues that start to head down this path. Everybody wants to cut taxes. I mean, who’s against lower taxes? But if you like some of these services, you like the roads and all the rest of that and the money’s got to come from somewhere . . . Even with the recent special session where we’re trying to spend some of the surplus from fiscal year 2024 don’t just cut the taxes. I mean, if we got some surplus here, let’s start applying it to places where it is needed. There’s no reason why the state couldn’t, for example, say, “Okay, we’re going to give our teachers a pay raise.” But then there are a lot of other things that need some money as well. So, it’s much more complicated than gets stated.
Vincent: My number one issue, out of everything this year is teacher salaries. I have a young child, and I know a lot of teachers around here. Amazing, incredible teachers shouldn’t have to leave the state to work. You can easily make thousands of dollars more in a neighboring state, and based on our location, it’s very easy for them to cross over the border into another state. The teachers that are staying here, they’re staying here because they deeply care about the community. But I’ve already spoken to teachers who are like, I don’t know how much longer I can, especially with their insurance rates increasing.
My personal belief is that if we do start focusing on teachers, that will hopefully make families want to come more into the state, and I feel like that would then bring business into the state. The Boards of Education in Hampshire County, and Mineral County, they’re some of the biggest employers in the state right now. Our state legislature is basically undercutting our biggest employers in this region. So I think that should be a top priority. I don’t think we should have these tiny little increases for our teachers. I think that they need to be paid well.
Right now we have legislators whose sentiment is “If you want a good paying job, leave the state.”
I think we need somebody in office who’s like, “Oh my goodness, this is a problem. What can I do?”